453
this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2026
453 points (98.9% liked)
Technology
88271 readers
3116 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
How many people in Congress are older than email?
A slim majority, about 300 out of 535, figuring the date of creation of email at 1971.
For additional context, you know that infamous clip of Katie Couric being utterly baffled about how an email address works before asking her producer "Could you explain what 'internet' is?" That aired on January 24, 1994. Which, I can understand, the world wide web was switched on in August of 1991, not 3 years prior, so there wasn't a lot of demand for internet connectivity among the masses yet. It was about the time for TV personalities to learn about email live on air.
That was 32 years ago, when email was already 23 years old.
Born before 1971? That's barely the required entry age (I jest).
Seriously though, it's possible to learn "computer stuff" even after you're born (I jest again).
Which for some reason many politicians - often somewhat older - refuse to do. "We have people for that, and anyhow, PR and polls are more important".
My father in law died almost 10 years ago at 94.
He was still going to thrift shops to get old PCs to rebuild until around 90 when his vision started giving out. He was a tax accountant who just happened to be into technology, and it was tangentially related at best to his career of almost 70 years.
Flip side is my 30+ years of doing IT, frequently dealing with people younger than me who lamented they were too old to learn the BASICS of how the device that essentially kept them fed worked. This is not in reference to people just doing their proverbial 9 to 5 or implying they should work harder than their wages… it was almost entire engineers and commercial real estate brokers. People with either some education or way further up the socioeconomic ladder than I was. It was a choice to stay ignorant. Sometimes even a perverse badge of honor.
So even though congress is OVERWHELMINGLY elderly, any of them could have cared to learn even the basics in the last 34 years of commercially available internet. Or even before depending on career.
Then again, we have jeenyuses like Tommy Tuberville, so any argument of learning for the sheer sake of knowledge goes out the window.
That's a great story.
I learned early on that it's me who has power over the machine, not the other way round.
Yep. Like they'd somehow get their fingers dirty if they bothered to learn how that machine worked.
One of the brokers at my last job (l ‘retired’ in 2016) had an assistant who did just about every aspect of his work except the schmoozing. This pathetic excuse for a functioning human couldn’t figure out why he “couldn’t login to his email” multiple times while I worked there. Every 90 days even. Something along the lines of “I don’t understand, my password worked yesterday”.
This stupid motherfucker was getting locked out of his Active Directory account and couldn’t unlock his PC. After a solid 15 days of warnings that he would need to change his password. For years this kept happening. I believe he was raking in high 7 figures MINIMUM and all he was good for was convicting other people to spend money on corporate real estate.
and the password needs to be his kids names because that's the password they use for things
With a constantly iterating digit at the start. Fun times.
I'm guessing the answer is "yes".
there are silent generation in congress, that are older than boomers, so most of them.